We’re Steele Having Fun And He’s Steele The One

Eric Kleefeld at Talking Points Memo:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele may be misremembering exactly how and when the Afghanistan war began.

At a Republican Party fundraiser in Connecticut on Thursday, Steele declared that the war in Afghanistan “was a war of Obama’s choosing” that America had not “actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in,” in a response to an attendee’s question about the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal — which Steele called “very comical.”

“The McChrystal incident, to me, was very comical. And I think it’s a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this Administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan,” said Steele. “Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

“It was one of those, one of those areas of the total board of foreign policy [“in the Middle East”? — Note: The audio is not quite clear in this section.] that we would be in the background, sort of shaping the changes that were necessary in Afghanistan as opposed to directly engaging troops,” Steele continued. “But it was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.”

Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard:

Dear Michael,

You are, I know, a patriot. So I ask you to consider, over this July 4 weekend, doing an act of service for the country you love: Resign as chairman of the Republican party.

Your tenure has of course been marked by gaffes and embarrassments, but I for one have never paid much attention to them, and have never thought they would matter much to the success of the causes and principles we share. But now you have said, about the war in Afghanistan, speaking as RNC chairman at an RNC event, “Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.” And, “if [Obama] is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?”

Needless to say, the war in Afghanistan was not “a war of Obama’s choosing.” It has been prosecuted by the United States under Presidents Bush and Obama. Republicans have consistently supported the effort. Indeed, as the DNC Communications Director (of all people) has said, your statement “puts [you] at odds with about 100 percent of the Republican Party.”

And not on a trivial matter. At a time when Gen. Petraeus has just taken over command, when Republicans in Congress are pushing for a clean war funding resolution, when Republicans around the country are doing their best to rally their fellow citizens behind the mission, your comment is more than an embarrassment. It’s an affront, both to the honor of the Republican party and to the commitment of the soldiers fighting to accomplish the mission they’ve been asked to take on by our elected leaders.

There are, of course, those who think we should pull out of Afghanistan, and they’re certainly entitled to make their case. But one of them shouldn’t be the chairman of the Republican party.

Sincerely yours,

William Kristol

Think Progress:

Dear Bill,

You love, we know, war. Love it. Always trying to get America into new and bigger ones. It’s your thing. We get it.

But we think you’re being unfair towards RNC Chairman Michael Steele. Sure, he was wrong when he said that Afghanistan “was a war of Obama’s choosing” and “not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.” But as you correctly note, his entire term has been marked by “gaffes and embarrassments” — such as telling African Americans they “don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, by suggesting Republicans are “drinking that Potomac River water” and “getting high,” and telling the public that it has “no reason, none, to trust” the GOP. But none of this produced from you the slightest peep of protest.

You express concern that Mr. Steele breaks from Republican orthodoxy by voicing his criticisms of the Afghanistan war. But when Mr. Steele broke from Republican principles and expressed his view that abortion should be an “individual choice,” we didn’t hear your call for his resignation. (In fact, your publication defended him.)

What really irks you is that Mr. Steele has the temerity to suggest that the continued war in Afghanistan is not a good idea — which is a debate worth having. It’s therefore no surprise that the one thing that should motivate you to call for the resignation of Mr. Steele is his suggestion that it’s a bad idea for the U.S. to continue to “engage in a land war in Afghanistan.”

For the crime of questioning an American war, you feel that Mr. Steele must pay. This shouldn’t be a political issue — members of both parties have concerns about the current course in Afghanistan, and members of both parties should be having this debate. Not just Democrats.

So Mr. Kristol, instead of calling on Mr. Steele to resign, challenge him to a debate on Afghanistan to discuss your foreign policy views. And as for Mr. Steele, we hope he stays.

Sincerely yours,

The Think Progress team

Erick Erickson at Redstate:

I have heard Michael Steele’s comments regarding Afghanistan and the President.

I have read the RNC’s statement on the matter.

The RNC statement is indecipherable in the context of what Michael Steele actually said.

The war in Afghanistan is not a war of Barack Obama’s choosing. It is a war of Al Qaeda and the Taliban’s choosing. We responded.

Michael Steele must resign. He has lost all moral authority to lead the GOP.

Greg Sargent:

The statement from DNC spox Brad Woodhouse, just out:

RNC CHAIRMAN MICHAEL STEELE BETS AGAINST OUR TROOPS, ROOTS FOR FAILURE

“Here goes Michael Steele setting policy for the GOP again. The likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham will be interested to hear that the Republican Party position is that we should walk away from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban without finishing the job. They’d also be interested to hear that the Chairman of the Republican Party thinks we have no business in Afghanistan notwithstanding the fact that we are there because we were attacked by terrorists on 9-11.

“And, the American people will be interested to hear that the leader of the Republican Party thinks recent events related to the war are ‘comical’ and that he is betting against our troops and rooting for failure in Afghanistan. It’s simply unconscionable that Michael Steele would undermine the morale of our troops when what they need is our support and encouragement. Michael Steele would do well to remember that we are not in Afghanistan by our own choosing, that we were attacked and that his words have consequences.”

The DNC argument for using this script is that Dems rarely attack Republicans as being against the troops, while Republicans go after Dems this way on a nearly daily basis. They would insist that the strong language really is warranted. Steele said that history suggests we can’t win there — this is what the DNC describes as “betting against our troops.” And Bill Kristol agrees that this is an “affront” to them.

Are liberal Dems who have made much the same case about Afghanistan also “rooting for failure” and “betting against our troops”? The DNC would argue that this is a different situation — that Steele’s argument isn’t in good faith. It cuts against what he himself has said in the past — that we must win — and is at odds with his entire party. Also, they’d argue that coming from a party leader, his words really do have consequences for troop morale and for the war effort.

But Steele didn’t “root for failure” anywhere. And he isn’t really “betting against our troops.” He’s saying that this an inherently unwinnable situation, however brave and tough the troops are. I don’t know if that’s what he believes, but that’s what he said.

Clearly, Dems are opting for strong language to break through on a Friday before a holiday weekend in the belief that this does raise real questions about Steele’s candor. But this is Karl Rove’s playbook. I don’t care how often Republicans do it — this blog is not on board with this kind of thing from either party.

Doug Mataconis:

The DNC is taking a hit at Steele, but it’s not really a fair one because he isn’t alone in being a Republican who is expressing doubts about continued American involvement in Iraq. George Will said pretty much the same thing, albeit much more eloquently than Steele, back in September. And, earlier this year, The Cato Institute hosted a forum in which several conservative intellectuals and Members of Congress essentially endorsed the idea that America needed to drastically scale back it’s involvement in Afghanistan. So, to say that Steele is bucking his own party on this issue simply isn’t true.

At the same time, though, Steele’s assertion that Afghanistan is a war of “Obama’s choosing” is simply absurd. For one thing, the war itself was started, and continued, under a Republican President. Moreover, while it’s true that the President did make the idea of concentrating on Afghanistan instead of Iraq part of his campaign, he was hardly alone in arguing that we needed to continue our involvement in Afghanistan. In fact, it’s hard to say what would be different in that war if John McCain had won in 2008 instead of Barack Obama. So, calling it a war of “Obama’s choosing” is simply ridiculous.

And while it is refreshing to hear Republicans questioning the war, I have to wonder if they’d be saying the same thing if the President had an R after his name.

Actually, I don’t have to wonder.

David Frum at FrumForm:

So I feel like an idiot.

About a week ago, one of the young staffers here proposed an article: “What happens if Republicans bug out on Afghanistan?” I nixed it. “Let’s not deal with hypotheticals.” Oops.

Michael Steele’s Afghanistan-skeptical comments seem to have been unscripted, but who knows. FrumForum’s Tim Mak placed an immediate call to the RNC to ask whether the chairman had perhaps been misunderstood or had possibly misspoken. The RNC had no comment. The comment is not being walked back, not today anyway.

Some thoughts in reply:

1) The time to make the case against an enhanced commitment to Afghanistan was a year ago, before that commitment was made. Back then, however, Republicans almost unanimously supported the president’s decision. Indeed Republicans pressed the president to make the decision and upbraided him for taking too long. Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, among others, myself included, signed a letter pledging bipartisan support for an Afghan surge. Back then, as I remember it, the main Republican criticism of the president was that he should not have mentioned a deadline for the Afghan surge.

2) Maybe as time passes people change their minds. Fine. But if they do change their minds, they should acknowledge that is what they have done. They should not revise history so that a strategy that was broadly supported by all becomes “Obama’s war.”

3) Maybe the strategy is genuinely wrong. Maybe the Afghanistan commitment is not worth the costs. Maybe instituting a stable central government in Afghanistan is an over-ambitious project. Again: fine. But with the guns firing, that’s a point of view to advocate in a serious and considered way, as part of a debate over national interests, not to score political points. The debate should be aimed at finding a resolution in Afghanistan that is maximally successful for the U.S. and partners, not the way that is maximally humiliating to the president. Obama may fail in Afghanistan. But if he does, the whole country fails with him

Daniel Larison:

There is a lot to catch up after the last week away, but I thought I would start by saying a few things about Michael Steele’s Afghanistan remarks. They have predictably drawn the ire of Bill Kristol, who has called for Steele’s resignation, but Steele’s continued tenure at the RNC doesn’t interest me very much. What I do find interesting is how the utterly shameless, reflexive Republican opposition to everything Obama touches has finally run into the brick wall of one issue that most Republicans and mainstream conservatives consider to be completely non-negotiable. Incorrigible misrepresentation of every other foreign policy initiative Obama undertakes is permitted, but staking out a relatively less hawkish position than the administration is simply not tolerated.

Obviously Steele’s Afghanistan comments are not derived from any serious principled objection to an American presence in Afghanistan, and they certainly don’t reflect any fundamental opposition to foreign entanglements. As far as I can tell, Steele has rarely given these questions any attention at all until now, and he was a reliable backer of the Iraq war all along just like virtually every other aspiring Republican office-seeker and elected official. Steele evidently believes that Afghanistan is now a political liability for Obama, and he wants to take advantage of this, but far from being a potential “turning point” it is just another example of how clueless and hopeless Steele is when it comes to serving in a leadership capacity for Republicans. I can hardly wait to hear how Steele’s cynical posturing is another sign of the rise of antiwar Republicanism.

However, even if Steele were sincere and principled in his objections, it would be important to explain why he is wrong. It is true that last year Obama chose to increase the number of soldiers in Afghanistan, where the war effort had been chronically under-manned and under-resourced for most of the last decade, but this has been the one war in the last fifteen years that the U.S. did not choose to enter. It probably grates on many Republicans that the one war that comes closest to anything resembling a just or necessary war in the last decade is the one that they quite deliberately starved of resources and manpower. It is also probably discomforting that they did this to pursue a war in Iraq that has consumed far more lives, both American and Iraqi, and which had not even the remotest connection to American interests. Steele says that there are “other ways to engage in Afghanistan,” which confirms that he has no desire to disengage fully from the country, but if other “antiwar” Republican arguments are anything to go by he means that we should bombard Afghanistan from afar and hope for the best. Steele doesn’t really mean what he’s saying, but even if he did we shouldn’t take it seriously.

UPDATE: Ann Coulter at Human Events

Andrew Sullivan on Coulter

Tom Maguire on Coulter and Sullivan

Wave The Wand Or Wave The White Flag

Charlie Savage at the NYT:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”

The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.

The Daily Caller:

Polls suggest that the majority of Americans want Guantanamo Bay to remain open in the wake of the attempted terrorists attacks on Times Square and a Detroit-bound airliner. Congress, according to the White House, hasn’t moved quickly on its plan to move detainees to an Illinois prison. And Attorney General Eric Holder’s initial decision to hold the trial for alleged 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York even upset top White House adviser Rahm Emanuel, who argued that such a trial would alienate Republicans and prevent the closure of Guantanamo Bay.

Confronted with these problems — as well as the McCrystal flap, worsening economic numbers, and the ongoing Gulf Coast oil spill — the White House may have decided to simply punt on Guantanamo after all. Top officials told The New York Times that the president’s ‘magic wand’ was incapable of providing the administration any other alternative.

Ed Morrissey:

The “wave a wand” gripe should elicit loud peals of laughter from both sides of the aisle.  Barack Obama’s critics on his Gitmo position made that very same point repeatedly, both before the 2008 presidential election and after Obama made his order to close Gitmo his first official act as President.  Any such move required the President to find a different and yet still suitable detention facility, one where foreign terrorists captured by military and intelligence personnel would have separate adjudication from Americans in normal criminal courts, and one which could be secured properly for its purpose.  It would then have to contemplate the costs and benefits of such a move when in the end the detainees would end up using the very same processes they currently have for adjudication.

If Congress has dragged its feet, it’s only because no one can really explain how closing Gitmo while retaining the military commissions systems justifies the costs and the risks.  The issue the Left has with Gitmo isn’t its geographical location, after all.  When Obama committed to using the military commissions system to process the rest of the detainees in Gitmo, he himself mooted the necessity of closing it.  And for good reason — the use of criminal courts to try foreign terrorists in military or intel contexts would either result in botched prosecutions, or in changing the rules that protect American residents against undue prosecutorial power in criminal court.

The only one waving a wand on Gitmo was Obama himself.  And now he hopes to wave another wand in a Friday night news dump to keep his Left from erupting in outrage over Obama’s white flag on Gitmo.  Best of luck with that, Mr. President.

Glenn Greenwald:

So that appears to be a consensus:  Guantanamo — the closing of which was one of Obama’s central campaign promises — will still be open as of 2013, by which point many of the detainees will have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charges of any kind and without any real prospect for either due process or release, at least four of those years under a President who was elected on a commitment to close that camp and restore the rule of law.

None of this is news to anyone even casually watching what’s been going on, but there are several aspects of this article which are so noteworthy for illustrating how this administration works.  Let’s begin with this:  Obama officials — cowardly hiding behind anonymity as usual — raise the typical excuse which they and their defenders perpetually invoke for their “failures” to fulfill their campaign positions:  it’s all Congress’ fault (“They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame,” Savage writes).  It’s true that Congress has enacted measures to impede the closing of Guantanamo, and threatened to enact others, but the Obama administration’s plan was never so much to close Guantanamo as to simply re-locate it to Thompson, Illinois (GTMO North), in the process retaining one of its key, defining features — indefinite, due-process-free detention — that made it such a menace in the first place (that’s the attribute that led Candidate Obama to scorn it as a “legal black hole”).

The only meaningful way to “close Guantanamo” is to release the scores of detainees whom the administration knows are innocent and then try the rest in a real court (as Pakistan just did with Americans they accused of Terrorism).  Imprisoning only those people whom you convict of crimes is a terribly radical, purist, Far Leftist concept, I know — the Fifth Amendment is so very un-Pragmatic and pre-9/11 — and that is something the administration therefore refused from the start even to consider.

Tom Maguire:

Let’s stagger down memory lane to Day Three of Hope and Change:

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

Gitmo was a deplorable symbol of this and that, until actually resolving the situation became too complicated.  Anyway, it’s the thought that counts:

In any case, one senior official said, even if the administration concludes that it will never close the prison, it cannot acknowledge that because it would revive Guantánamo as America’s image in the Muslim world.

“Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”

Move on.

James Joyner:

The bottom line is that this is just very hard. It’s debatable as to whether the Bush Administration should ever have transferred jihadists and alleged jihadists from Afghanistan to Gitmo. But, once they did, reversing it became very difficult.

Honor And The Media: Steyn v. Friedersdorf

Phyllis Chesler at Pajamas Media:

I am talking about how rarely the American mainstream media covers honor killings committed in North America.

For example, there was no mention of the 2006 honor murder of 20-year-old Canadian-Afghan Muslim, Khatera Sadiqi, and her fiancée, Feroz Mangal, by her brother, Habibullah, in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, or the Wall Street Journal.

Alright, this took place in Canada, not in the United States. That might explain it. Ah, no so fast.

One could only read about the very high profile 2008 Dallas-based honor killings of the two Egyptian-American Muslim Said sisters, Sarah and Amina, in a single paragraph of 60 words, which was buried in a piece of 911 words in the New York Times. There was nothing in the Los Angeles Times and nothing in the hardcopy version of the Washington Post, although some blogs appeared at their website which referred to another newspaper article which had mentioned these murders in passing.

Guess what? The Wall Street Journal was out to lunch on this one too.

To their credit, Fox News systematically reported on the Said sisters and also ran a documentary devoted to their case. And, of course, to our credit, the blogosphere was lit up like Times Square about this case. Special kudos to Pajamas Media, FrontPage, Newsrealblog, Islam in Europe, Europe News, Human Rights Service, War to Mobilize Democracy, Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and all the many other blogs that have been tracking honor killings worldwide.

Nevertheless, the father-murderer of these two young girls who were murdered for being “too western” remains safely at large, probably back home in Egypt raising another family or two.

The New York Times also failed to cover the 2008 honor killings of American-Pakistani Muslim Sandeela Kanwal in Atlanta, Georgia, and American-Ethiopian Muslim Hawlett Mohammed, in Alexandria, Virginia — but they covered, at length, the 2008 murder of Hindu-American Monika Rani, who was burned alive in Oak Forest, Illinois, by her father because she married below her caste. This honor killing merited 470 words in the Gray Lady.

I am not surprised because when it comes to honor killings the mainstream media is far more attentive to Hindu than to Muslim honor murders. (Most Hindu caste-related honor killings seem to occur in India, not in the Indian diaspora in the West).

Mark Steyn at The Corner:

I’ve noted this phenomenon many times: See, for example, here at NR, “Noor Ignored“, “Watery Graves“, “The Stranglehold of Political Correctness“, and “Headless Body in Legless Story“. But nothing changes. Multiculturalism trumps feminism, and so the media accept a two-tier sisterhood in which Muslim girls are run over, stabbed, strangled, drowned and decapitated for wanting to live like the women they read about in The New York Times and The Washington Post. No matter how novel or arresting the details of a story are, the PC blinkers go on immediately. As Miss Chesler adds:

In 2009, the gruesome beheading of Aasiya Z. Hassan was covered only five days later by the New York Times—and then mainly to explain that Islam had nothing to do with it and that anyone who believes to the contrary is misguided or prejudiced.

The media’s attitude to “honor killings” is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it’s also part of the reason why America’s newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic:

Let’s survey “their silence on this issue,” shall we?

In The New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, a quick search reveals a June 20, 1999 story titled “For Shame: A Special Report. Arab Honor’s Price: A Woman’s Blood.” It is 3,941 words.

That same year — the first of my search — a story about the complexity of growing up Muslim in New York City mentioned the practice in passing. A March 2000 story about Unicef efforts to fight violence against women mentioned honor killings among other forms of extreme assault. In May 2000, a 1200 word story focuses on an honor killing perpetrated by a Dominican man. The editorial page inveighed against honor killings in November 2000. Honor killings are mentioned in this 2001 piece, which begins, “Islam preaches equality, yet in most Muslim countries a woman’s place is determined by a man’s will. It’s the law.” A 2002 piece titled, “In Pakistan, Rape Victims Are the Criminals” begins:

The evidence of guilt was there for all to see: a newborn baby in the arms of its mother, a village woman named Zafran Bibi.

Her crime: she had been raped. Her sentence: death by stoning.

In October 2002 Nick Kristoff mentioned honor killings in a column about the repression of women in the Middle East. A February 2003 essay centers on an honor killing a Muslim girl witnessed and its impact on her life. The headline on a 2003 Dexter Filkins piece: “Honor Killings Defy Turkish Efforts to End Them.” An excerpt from a long 2003 opinion piece from Bagdhad:

Even these brutalized sisters are luckier than many women in Iraq. They have no adult male relatives, and thus are not at risk for the honor killings that claim the lives of many Muslim women here. Tribal custom demands that a designated male kill a female relative who has been raped, and the law allows only a maximum of three years in prison for such a killing, which Iraqis call ”washing the scandal.”

”We never investigate these cases anyway — someone has to come and confess the killing, which they almost never do,” said an investigator who looked into the case and then dismissed it because the sisters ”knew one of the men, so it must not be kidnapping.”

This violence has made postwar Iraq a prison of fear for women.

Another 2003 story tells Times readers about an inquiry into honor killings in Pakistan. Several 2004 stories mentioned honor killings while reporting on Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union. Here is one. This lengthy magazine piece from 2004 mentions honor killings as one thing an upstart Arab news station wanted to cover. It came up elsewhere in the newspaper that year, but we’ve got a long way to go, so let’s just skip to the fact that they were also mentioned in this lengthy 2005 magazine profile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “Turks to Fight Honor Killings of Women,” another headline blared later that year, during which Nick Kristof mentioned honor killings in at least three more columns.

Columnist Roger Cohen got in on the act too: “Six recent ‘honor killings’ in Berlin, where about 10 percent of the 2.5 million Turks in Germany live, have focused attention on a culture of violent male repression of women in some Muslim immigrant communities in Europe,” he wrote. “The most talked-about case is that of Hatan Sürücü, a 23-year-old single mother, gunned down near her Berlin home in February.”

[…]

llustrating the depth of Mr. Steyn’s wildly inaccurate characterization has taken quite awhile, so I’m afraid I haven’t got the energy to delve into the archives of other major American newspapers, though a quick Google search yields the 2009 USA Today piece, “Honor Killings in US Raise Concerns,” a Boston Globe column titled “The Islamist War on Muslim Women,” the Denver Post version of widely syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts’ column “Honor Killing Comes to the US,” a column by Rod Dreher, then columnist and editorial board member at the Dallas Morning News, a Los Angeles Times story about honor killings in India… the list goes on and on.

Let’s recap, focusing on the New York Times alone. Over a period of roughly a decade, the newspaper ran everything from major internationally reported stories on honor killings in its glossy magazine to a crime story about a local honor killing on its New York regional page. It covered honor killings in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

The topic garnered attention from magazine editors, freelancers, staff reporters in the newspaper, writers on the book review and arts pages, and multiple op-ed columnists from across the ideological spectrum. One of those columnists wrote multiple items about honor killings across several years (and even mentioned them in a couple columns that won a Pulitzer Prize!). Considering the magazine stories on honor killings alone, the Times must have spent tens of thousands of dollars at minimum covering the subject in its Sunday glossy. Honor killings were also deemed important enough to frequently appear in the World Section briefs.

So what on earth is Mark Steyn talking about? Having reviewed the incomplete summary of honor killings coverage in the New York Times alone, could any rational, informed person honestly characterize American newspapers and their handling of this issue as he did?

Let’s look again at his conclusion: “The media’s attitude to ‘honor killings’ is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it’s also part of the reason why America’s newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.”

Does the coverage you’ve seen dishonor the dead? Does it betray an unwillingness to cover this issue due to political correctness? Can the charge of “silence” possibly go uncorrected in the pages of NRO?

It’s a good test. Perhaps Mr. Steyn was just woefully mistaken about the willingness of an American newspaper to cover honor killings. Now that he and the editors at National Review know better — I’ve e-mailed this post to Kathryn Jean Lopez — will a correction be forthcoming so that their audience isn’t misled?

Steyn responds:

I don’t often respond to Conor Friedersdorf, usually because it would require me to read him, and to be honest I don’t quite get the appeal of a guy who writes so portentously that you wonder if it’s some Guinness Book of Records stunt for the World’s Most Tightly Wound Bow Tie.

Evidently, my old friends at The Atlantic Monthly feel differently. From that perch, Mr Friedersdorf takes issue with my observations on “honor killings”, and has written to NR’s editors demanding a “correction”. The executive honchos in turn passed his demand on to me, and suggested I take a look at it as they’d been unable to get through it. So help me, I’d rather be fired – or honor-killed – than have to plough through another Friedersdorf post, but here goes.

So here’s how my piece began:

When you look at all the formulaic sludge that wins the Pulitzer Prize for Most Unread Multipart Series, it is striking that not one of the major newspapers has done an investigative series on the proliferation of “honor killings”, not in Yemen or Waziristan but in the heart of the western world.

In other words, Phyllis Chesler and I are writing about how “honor killings” have migrated from the distant horizon to The New York Times‘ backyard. All the examples she and I cite and link to are from North America. That’s what we’re writing about: Dead Muslim women in New York, Illinois, Texas, Quebec. Our neighbors.

Conor Friedersdorf demolishes our argument by pulling up yellowing Times thumbsuckers from ten years ago about “honor killings” in the Arab world, Turkey, Pakistan – and, eventually, Berlin.

I think Friedersdorf, in his usual pedantic way, has not refuted my point but reinforced it: The Times was more enthusiastic about covering “honor killings” when they were way out on the fringes of the map and could be used for a distant anthropological study of remote tribal cultures. Now they’re happening down the block in Buffalo, Peoria and Kingston, Ontario, and raise complicating questions for the prevailing pieties on diversity, multiculturalism, immigration, assimilation et al, questions for which most of the liberal press has no stomach.

So, no, there won’t be a “correction”. I’ll stand by what I wrote, this morning and last year:

If there were a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Frank Rich et al would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in our society, but you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse, and progressive opinion and the press couldn’t give a hoot. Indeed, as The Atlantic notes, it’s merely an obsession of us right-wing kooks.

Why aren’t Noor Almaleki and Aasiya Hassan as famous as Matthew Shepard? They weren’t in up-country villages in the Pakistani tribal lands. They were Americans – and they died because they wanted to live as American women.

Ah-ha! says Friedersdorf, triumphantly. But The New York Times ran a piece on honor killings in Syria in 2007!

Oh, well, everything’s fine and dandy then…

Freidersdorf responds:

On The Corner, however, Mr. Steyn objects that his post was only talking about the “silence” of American newspapers when it comes to honor killings in the United States — apparently their proclivity for dishonoring the dead, being politically correct, and bowing to multiculturalism stops at the water’s edge.

What Mr. Steyn neglects — beyond stories cited in my original post, like the Denver Post column titled “Honor Killing Comes to US” and a USA Today story titled “Honor Killings in US Raise Concerns” — are two facts: 1) newspapers are covering the issue abroad more than at home because it is relatively rare here, unlike in Syrian or Turkey or even Germany; 2) but even if we restrict our analysis to cases he mentions, his original item is still wrong.

As an example, take Noor Almaleki, whose father ran over her with a car near Phoenix, Arizona. Were American newspapers silent? Let’s take a look at The Arizona Republic to find out. The Gannett paper, the largest in Arizona, published the following coverage about the case:

10/24/09 — Lifestyle May Have Put Woman in Hospital.

Police interviews with friends and family revealed that Faleh, a Glendale resident, had threatened his daughter before for becoming “too Westernized” and failing to live by traditional Iraqi values.

Social experts say that a long history of tribal cultural tradition dictates that women who live outside the group’s moral code dishonor the entire family. For many, it’s a terminal offense, leading to an “honor killing.”

10/29/2009 — Subtracting ‘honor’ from ‘honor killing.’

10/30/2009 — Glendale man accused of running over daughter found.

11/02/2009 — Woman in Suspected Honor Killing Dies.

11/06/2009 — Glendale honor killing victim, 20, just wanted to be normal.

12/21/2009 — Glendale dad accused in honor killing faces murder charge.

01/13/2010 — Religion issue raised in case of Glendale man in ‘honor killing.’

02/19/10 — Dad accused in ‘honor killing’ will not face death penalty.

04/10/2010 — Police: ‘Honor Killing’ suspect may have been aided by family.

There are other mentions too.

Mr. Steyn cites Noor Almaleki as an example of American newspapers going silent when honor killings happen in their backyard. But obviously that isn’t the case — when an honor killing happened in its backyard, The Arizona Republic covered the case exhaustively. As I asserted in my original post, Mr. Steyn’s writing on this subject gives his readers a misleading impression of reality.

Andrew Sullivan:

Steyn’s notion that he was only concerned with MSM “silence” on honor killings in the US is pedantry when you read the post, and his previous fulminations. But even if we concede this tap-dance, he’s still flat-wrong. The reason that Noor Almaleki and Aasiya Hassan are less famous than Matthew Shepard is because almost no murder victim is as famous as Matthew Shepard – well, maybe Natalee Holloway. They’re white, Mr Steyn. That’s why they’re more famous. Unfair and wrong – but fame in America is often like that.

Tom Maguire:

Having reviewed the Times coverage as presented by Mr. Friedersdorf, I don’t think any rational person could conclude that Mr. Steyn is wrong in claiming that the Times, as a proxy for the MSM, has waltzed away from the coverage of honor killings in its own backyard.

[…]

If Conor Friedersdorf wants to hector others about their close-mindedness, he will have more impact if he first listens to what they are saying.

HOW DO WE SCORE THIS:  What is the baseline for the “correct” level of coverage of honor killings in North America?  Who knows?!?  This NPR story mentions a global problem and links to two stories about honor killings in North America.  Hey, that is big-time coverage in defiance of the Steyn Assertion.  On the other hand, the second NPR story describes four honor killings in North America, including two in New York State; the NY Times, in accordance with the Steyn Assertion, does not mention either of those.

Conor Friedersdorf at The American Scene:

I’ve been debating those subjects with Mark Steyn — if you click over to my latest post, links to the rest are provided.

I’m also putting up a half dozen posts a day at The Atlantic’s Ideas Blog. Please visit! It runs for another several weeks. After that you’ll see me back here a bit more for some non-political posts I am planning.

UPDATE: In comments, Mike Farmer writes, “I believe your campaign to bring down conservatives is causing a type of blindness which is morally selective and fails to express moral outrage over self-imposed limits to your discernment.”

Interesting, the assumption that I am engaged in an effort to “bring down conservatives” when my modus operandi is actually just to disagree publicly when a conservative writes something that I find to be wrongheaded or inaccurate. Imagine that I triumphed entirely in my exchange with Mr. Steyn — that I persuaded him of my position, that he issued a correction at National Review Online, and that his future efforts to draw press attention to honor killings proceeded from assumptions that I believe to be more accurate.

In what sense would I have “brought him down”? He would remain a well-paid, widely read writer. His success at effecting the change he wants to see w/r/t honor killings would be enhanced, not diminished. Forceful disagreements can leave even the loser better off. Discourse among professional writers isn’t a zero sum game.

Don’t Come Crying To Me, Mr. President, When A Probe Comes And Sucks Up Our Oceans

Stephen Clark at Fox News:

Environmentalists, already peeved with the administration’s handling of the Gulf oil spill, are accusing President Obama of breaking his campaign pledge to end the slaughter of whales.

The Obama administration is leading an effort within the International Whaling Commission to lift a 24-year international ban on commercial whaling for Japan, Norway and Iceland, the remaining three countries in the 88-member commission that still hunt whales.

The administration argues that the new deal will save thousands of whales over the next decade by stopping the three countries from illegally exploiting loopholes in the moratorium.

But environmentalists aren’t buying it.

“That moratorium on commercial whaling was the greatest conservation victory of the 20th century. And in 2010 to be waving the white flag or bowing to the stubbornness of the last three countries engaged in the practice is a mind-numbingly dumb idea,” Patrick Ramage, the whaling director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told FoxNews.com.

Wayne Pacelle at Huffington Post:

Humane Society International and The Humane Society of the United States, together with actor Pierce Brosnan and his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, are asking supporters to take action to save whales — again. Nearly a quarter century after the moratorium on commercial whaling took effect, the threat to whales worldwide has never been greater. Whaling, toxic pollution, ship strikes, noise pollution, and climate change are all factors in the endangerment of these creatures.

This week, on the eve of the 62nd meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Agadir, Morocco, the government of Australia took a decisive step to protect whales, filing suit in the International Court of Justice against Japan’s “scientific whaling” in the Southern Ocean. The suit seeks an injunction to bar Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean Whaling Sanctuary. In 2007, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an election pledge to ban whaling in the sanctuary, a 50-million-square-kilometer area surrounding the continent of Antarctica, where the IWC has banned all types of commercial whaling.

The lawsuit comes even as the member nations of the IWC are locked in debate over a compromise proposal, to be voted on at Agadir, that would allow the whaling nations to resume commercial whaling with the understanding that they abide by quotas.

Australia’s filing claims that Japan has abused its right to conduct scientific research whaling under Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, which provides for a scientific exemption. In 2008-09 Japan killed 1,004 whales, including 681 in the Southern Ocean. Since the moratorium came into effect, more than 33,000 whales have been killed under the article.

The lawsuit also asserts that Japan has breached its international obligations under the 1973 Convention on International Trade on Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora by hunting whale species listed as endangered, and invokes Article 3 of the1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, claiming that Japanese whaling is causing harm beyond national jurisdiction in the Southern Ocean.

Unfortunately, in the view of nearly the entire American animal protection and environmental community, the United States government has abdicated its leadership role in the defense of whales, encouraging consideration of a compromise proposal and actively politicking for its adoption. The delegation head has even disparaged the Australian initiative in the International Court of Justice.

Rich Lowry at National Review Online:

When it comes to whaling, Japan is a rogue state.

Since 1986, there’s been a moratorium on commercial whaling that Japan has honored only in the breach. Norway and Iceland don’t honor it at all, while a few aboriginal communities get exemptions. As a consequence, during the past 20 years, the number of whales killed annually has steadily increased; roughly 2,000 were killed last year.

This is a vast improvement over the 80,000 whales killed in 1960, but it’s a very leaky ban. The International Whaling Commission, the 88-nation body that regulates whaling, is now considering a proposal to formally lift the moratorium, in exchange for supposedly tighter limits on newly sanctioned hunting. The idea is that a more realistic regime will save thousands of whales during the next ten years.

But conservationists are rightly galled at a proposal that will again legitimate the killing of nature’s most majestic creatures — as harmless as they are awesome — with no guarantee that the number of whale catches will really go down substantially.

Whaling lost its Melville-esque romance long ago. Once, “iron men in wooden boats” hunted the beasts in something of an even match — otherwise, Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest for the white whale wouldn’t have been so self-destructive.

The rise of steam engines, explosive harpoons, and then factory ships — capable of killing and processing whales at sea — facilitated the mass slaughter of whales. The creatures had as much a chance against their hunters as bologna does against a grinder. They were killed in a decades-long movable charnel house.

In the first four decades of the 20th century, about 900,000 whales were killed just in the southern hemisphere. Blue whales, the largest animal on earth, had once been too fast for whaling ships. Not in the new age. Since 1920, their population has declined by 96 percent. Many species were hunted to the brink of extinction.

It became clear the carnage didn’t even suit the interests of the hunters, who would soon be bereft of prey. Hunting became restricted, and then, in a great victory for animal conservationists, the IWC ratified the moratorium in 1986.

Why protect whales? They should be preserved as befits anything else that evokes wonder; they are the mammalian equivalent of the Grand Canyon or of the giant redwoods. They are also incredibly long-lived creatures with a sophisticated social structure, closer to chimpanzees than to cattle.

Besides, there’s no reason to kill whales. No one has needed whale oil to light lamps for at least a century, and blubber isn’t a necessary source of nutrition in a modern society. Yet Japan persists. It agitates against the moratorium and organizes international opposition to it at the same time it cynically defies it.

The Economist:

Countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, that oppose whaling are frustrated. The IWC has become a battleground between the two camps, with each side trying to recruit allies from neutral states. Half the body’s 88 members joined in the past decade—helping to make it deadlocked and dysfunctional, unable either to curb whale hunts or to reauthorise them.

There have been physical stand-offs as well as diplomatic ones. In January there was a collision between a Japanese ship and a trimaran from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a green group based in the American state of Washington. The crew (from Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands) had to abandon ship. In February Australia (with quiet sympathy from New Zealand) threatened to take Japan to the International Court of Justice unless it stopped whaling off Antarctica.

Against this nastiness, a “peace plan” was unveiled on April 22nd, Earth Day, by the IWC’s Chilean chairman, Crishán Maquieira, and his Antiguan deputy, Anthony Liverpool. It reflected months of closed-door talks among a dozen countries. The moratorium would be lifted for a decade, but whalers would agree to a sharp reduction in their catch, stricter enforcement measures and a ban on all cross-border commerce in whale products.

The aim is to buy time in which countries can hammer out a longer-term agreement, while achieving an immediate drop in the number of whales that are killed. Supporters—including Monica Medina, who heads America’s IWC delegation—say the deal seeks to “depoliticise” the whaling that does go on, while laying the ground for a tougher conservation system. The plan will be considered in June at the IWC’s annual meeting in Morocco.

Enter the naysayers

But objections are already coming in. New Zealand’s foreign minister, Murray McCully, calls the proposed quota for Antarctic waters unrealistic and unacceptable. Junichi Sato, a Japanese conservationist from Greenpeace who does not share his compatriots’ predilection for whaling, regrets that “the whales are making all the concessions, not the whalers.”

That is not an easy corner to argue in Tokyo. Japan’s fisheries minister, Hirotaka Akamatsu, deems the limit “too drastic” and wants it raised. But in principle at least, Japan is ready to make a deal. An official at the Fisheries Agency says that the country is willing to hunt fewer whales provided it can do so without international opprobrium. “We have to lose something in order to get something,” he says. Indeed, it can be argued that the biggest obstacles to a cut in the number of whales slaughtered do not lie with the harpoon-wielders, but rather with their most zealous opponents, for whom the best is the enemy of the good.

Japan’s critics say that by using a loophole in the IWC charter to practise “scientific” whaling, the country is violating the spirit of the document. Japanese officials counter that the 1946 convention never anticipated a moratorium on all commercial whaling. Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Japan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw America’s occupation. The aim was to provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation.

AtlantaJan at Daily Kos:

The current proposal would also:
Overturn the global ban on commercial whaling and allow hunting in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary around Antarctica.
Approve the killing of whales for commercial purposes by Japan around Antarctica and in the North Pacific.
Add new rights for Japan to hunt whales in its coastal waters.
Allow continuing whaling by Iceland and Norway in violation of long-agreed scientific procedures and the global whaling ban.

The Obama administration is spearheading a policy that would allow commercial whaling to proceed for 10 years. Commercial whaling has been banned since the 1970s. Before the ban on commercial whaling, close to 40,000 whales were killed annually; since the ban, that number has dropped to fewer than 2,000, and whale populations have begun to recover.

The administration is arguing that if we see whales being slaughtered, we are more likely to support a total moratorium. But that is like saying if we see people killing puppies, fewer people will kill puppies. It’s garbage.

According to a survey by the Nippon Research Center, more than 95 percent of Japanese residents had never eaten whale. But the Japanese government has begun supplying schools with whale meat in an attempt to justify its slaughter. Additionally, Japan has begun bribing land-locked nations in Africa, and poor nations like Nauru and Togo, with aid in exchange for support of position within the IWC.

Whales are intelligent animals. Australia has taken the lead on their protection. For the US to take any other position is abominable.

Tom Maguire:

Enviros are enraged, and rightly so – Rich Lowry explains that Japan has been a rogue state for decades on this topic.

But can we blame Bush?  Yes we can!  Or at least, the Brit Independent can:

The deal which may do away with [the ban], which has been on the table for three years, was first thought to be merely a diplomatic compromise to end the perpetual confrontation at IWC meetings between the whaling nations and the anti-whaling countries. But recently it has become clear that it had a different purpose, and was cooked up in the US – by leading figures in the Bush administration, among them being Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, until his conviction for taking unreported gifts in 2008, was the longest-serving Republican senator in American history.

One of the most powerful figures in US politics, Senator Stevens sought a deal with Japan after the Japanese caused problems for the US by objecting (as a bargaining counter in IWC negotiations) to the whale-hunting quota for Alaskan Inuit peoples, who have a traditional hunt for about 50 bowhead whales.

Senator Stevens is believed to have put pressure on the then-US Whaling Commissioner and IWC chairman, William Hogarth – whose budget, in the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr Stevens controlled as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee – to open talks with Japan, which Mr Hogarth duly did at the 2007 IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

Mr Hogarth’s proposals, which would have allowed the Japanese and others to restart whaling commercially, were eventually thrown out by the IWC. Yet the deal now back on the table is essentially a modified version of his original plan, which is even more favourable to the whaling states.

It is notable that the US, which used to have to negotiate its Inuit bowhead quota every five years, will get a 10-year quota if the new deal goes ahead.

Blaming Bush and the Eskimos – I knew it.  But if that is all the payback we get, I am surprised.

And can we find a flip-flip quote from Obama?  Yes we can!

As a candidate, President Obama said, “As president, I will ensure that the U.S. provides leadership in enforcing international wildlife protection agreements, including strengthening the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Allowing Japan to continue commercial whaling is unacceptable.” (March 16, 2008 – Greenpeace candidate questionnaire)

Yeah, well, that was more than two years ago, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and no one thinks Obama has a little mind.

UPDATE: Alex Knapp

Doug Mataconis

Some Say Gutted, Some Say Pruned

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog:

More than four decades after the Supreme Court ordered police to warn suspects about their rights before questioning them, the actual day-to-day practice has not turned out to be a simple ritual under clear ground rules.  Encounters in interrogation rooms still and often are a test of wills, with detectives trying to get answers and suspects trying to avoid talking themselves into deeper trouble.  As a result, the Court often has had to reinterpret its 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona.  It did so again on Tuesday, and this time the result decisively tilted the warnings procedure toward the police.

By a 5-4 vote, the Court for the first time made two things clear about Miranda rights: first, if a suspect does not want to talk to police — that is, to invoke a right to silence — he must say so, with a clear statement because it is not enough to sit silently or to remain uncooperative, even through a long session; and, second, if the suspect finally answers a suggestive question with a one-word response that amounts to a confession, that, by itself, will be understood as a waiver of the right to silence and the statement can be used as evidence.  Police need not obtain an explicit waiver of that right. The net practical effect is likely to be that police, in the face of a suspect’s continued silence after being given Miranda warnings, can continue to question him, even for a couple of hours, in hopes eventually of getting him to confess.

Those two declarations emerged in Berghuis v. Thompkins (08-1470), a Michigan drive-by shooting case.  Van Chester Thompkins, Jr., of Southfield, Mich., was convicted of murder, assault, and several firearm charges, and is serving life in prison without parole.  On Tuesday, the Court ruled that his Miranda rights had not been violated, and thus reaffirmed his conviction and sentence.  (In a separate part of the ruling, the Court also rejected a claim that his defense lawyer was ineffective in failing to seek a jury instruction to limit the damaging testimony of another man involved in the crime.)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, joined by the Court’s four most conservative members, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a strongly-worded dissent, accusing the majority of deciding the case more sweepingly than it needed to do and of carrying out “a substantial retreat from the protection” given by the Miranda decision.

Kent Scheidegger:

The Miranda rule remains intact in that the police must warn suspects of their rights and that an invocation of those rights by the suspect requires the police to stop questioning. Today’s decision involves what is needed to establish whether a suspect invoked or waived his rights.

To invoke the right to remain silent such that the police must stop, the suspect must say so expressly and unambiguously. On the other hand, a waiver of rights may be inferred from the facts that the suspect received the warnings, understood his rights, and responded to questions anyway.

The rule really in the Constitution, forbidding compelled statements, remains in force, of course. Today’s decision places limits on an entirely artificial rule grafted onto the Constitution by the Supreme Court. It is entirely appropriate that artificial rules be strictly limited, if they are not to be abandoned altogether.

Shani O. Hilton at Spencer Ackerman’s place:

In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that this decision “turns Miranda upside down.” And I admit, that was my first reaction, too.

But how did this case even get to the Supreme Court in the first place? It strikes me as completely laughable that someone can ask that a statement given during an interrogation be thrown out on the grounds that they didn’t talk for the first few minutes of being questioned. It should be as simple as: you have a right to remain silent, so long as you remain silent. That is, if you start talking, you’re no longer exercising that right.

Setting that aside, however, maybe the court’s decision isn’t that terrible. I think my initial reaction was out of worry that suspects may not know that they have to say something. But this ruling has the potential to clear up any ambiguity about the “remaining silent” clause. I was talking to a friend, and he noted that if the Miranda language were modified to include something along the lines of “you have to actively assert your right to remain silent,” it could be okay. Then cops, prosecutors, and suspects are all protected.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline

Tom Maguire:

The story does include this:

Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering ”yes,” ”no,” ”I don’t know,” nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for ”shooting that boy down,” Thompkins said, ”Yes.”

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

If the police felt the suspect was not being utterly unresponsive, then one can see why they would continue the interrogation.  Near-silence is not silence.

And I guess there could be a real problem with implementing a rule that equated silence with an assertion of the right to end the interrogation.  Would ten seconds of sullen silence be enough?  One minute?  Ten minutes?  When does the clock start, and who plays scorekeeper?

Scott Lemieux at Tapped:

While this outcome is unsurprising, there are a couple of implications worth noting. First, there was some concern that despite a generally liberal record, Sotomayor might lean excessively toward the state in civil-liberties issues. While today’s case doesn’t in itself prove that these concerns were unfounded — Breyer, the liberal justice most likely to defect on civil-liberties issues, joined her dissent — her strongly worded dissent is, at a minimum, a very encouraging sign.

And second, to return to another of my hobbyhorses, this proves that the much-touted “minimalism” of Alito and Roberts makes very little difference in terms of the bottom-line outcomes of cases. First of all, like Citizens United, this case shows that their minimalism is highly selective; when necessary to reach conservative outcomes Alito and Roberts are perfectly happy to write or join opinions that go well beyond what’s necessary to decide a particular case. And, second, “minimalist” refusals to overturn precedents may mean much less than they seem at first glance. It’s true that Miranda has been re-affirmed, but like a lot of other Warren and early Burger Court precedents, it has also been steadily drained of most of its bite. What matters is not so much whether or not precedents are explicitly overruled; it’s whether they’re actually applied in cases going forward.

The 90s, Like The 60s, Will Never Die

Greg Sargent:

Senior White House advisers asked former President Bill Clinton to talk to Joe Sestak about whether he was serious about running for Senate, and to feel out whether he’d be open to other alternatives, according to sources familiar with the situation.

But the White House maintains that the Clinton-Sestak discussions were informal, according to the sources. The White House, under pressure to divulge the specifics of its interactions with Sestak, will release a formal statement later today outlining their version of events, including Clinton’s involvement.

According to the sources, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel asked Clinton and his longtime adviser, lawyer Doug Band, to talk to Sestak about the race. It’s unclear right now whether the White House will say that Clinton was asked to suggest specific administration positions for Sestak, whether Clinton floated positions on his own, whether Clinton discussed other options not related to the adminstration, or whether employment even came up at all in the talks.

But the news that Clinton is at the center of this whole story is noteworthy on its own because of the former president’s stature, and underscores how heavily invested the White House was in dissuading Sestak from running. The White House sent Clinton to talk to Sestak because Arlen Specter, constituting the 60th Dem vote in the Senate, was viewed as key to enacting Obama’s agenda.

The White House maintains that Clinton’s overtures to Sestak merely constituted an effort to gauge his seriousness about the race, the sources say, adding that Clinton was informally discussing the range of options open to Sestak as part of a larger conversation meant to ascertain Sestak’s thinking.

I’ve been unable to ascertain precisely what Clinton discussed with Sestak in terms of his future options, but the release of the White House’s formal response will clear that up.

UPDATE, 11:41 a.m.: Here’s some detail on the job that the White House offered Sestak and the White House’s official response.

UPDATE, 1:21 p.m.: Sestak himself weighs in.

UPDATE, 3:03 p.m.: Chief ethics officer under Bush dismisses the idea that this is a scandal and tells Republicans it’s “time to move on.”

Dan Amira at New York Magazine:

Emanuel reportedly decided against a paid gig because he wanted Sestak to keep his House seat. As evidence of how poorly planned this all was, though, the White House later discovered that Sestak couldn’t serve on the Board and in Congress at the same time, either. It’s unclear whether Sestak turned down the offer before or after the White House came to this realization, but we imagine he was never really interested to begin with. Seriously, Rahm, you’re asking him to give up on a fairly good shot at becoming a senator, and all you can guarantee in return is an unpaid advisory position? We’re shocked he didn’t jump at the opportunity.

Paul Chesser at The American Spectator:

Never mind that Sestak said repeatedly he was offered a “job,” which by definition does not carry with it the condition “uncompensated.” But we must emphasize how badly the Democrats wanted to avoid a primary, so coming up with something of value that would attract Sestak was necessary. Among the other tempting incentives they considered offering:

1. A green job

2. Box seats to a Pirates game

3. A framed copy of Specter’s resignation from the Republican Party

4. A cookie

Officials finally settled on the equally valuable “uncompensated high-level advisory capacity” in the Administration. Can you believe Sestak turned them down?!

Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s place:

“Did you get Joe Sestak a job yet, Daddy?”

It seems like a believable story — I mean, who wouldn’t be convinced to give up their quest to become a United States Senator in return for a spiffy, uncompensated job title in an administration that may well be swept out of office in just over two years — sooner if nobody buys their explanation for this?

If it’s that easy I’m going to call Nancy Pelosi and convince her not to run for re-election by offering her a job as an unpaid volunteer at her plastic surgeon’s office and give her the title “Queen of the World.”

According to the New York Times, one of the “jobs” being dangled in front of Sestak was a position on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. One of duties of PIAB members is to bring to the president’s attention activities that are not being adequately addressed by the Attorney General — things like, oh I don’t know… the White House orchestrating a bribery to get somebody to drop out of a Senate race.

For those of you keeping score at home, “nothing improper took place” usually bats two or three spots in the lineup ahead of “mistakes were made.”

Rahm Emanuel couldn’t be reached for comment because he was in the middle of a dine-n-dash at an Israeli restaurant.

Tom Maguire:

So why do they think the job offer came from a White House official?  I am not going to be able to track down every utterance of Sestak, but he was a bit vague in his “bombshell” interview with Larry Kane and my understanding is that he has not advanced the story since them.  Here is some early coverage from Feb 20, 2010 which tilts Sestak’s way:

In the face of a White House denial, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak stuck to his story yesterday that the Obama administration offered him a “high-ranking” government post if he would not run against U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary.

“I was asked a direct question . . . and I answered it honestly,” Sestak said in a Fox News interview. “There’s nothing more to go into.”

Sestak made his startling claim Thursday during the taping of Comcast Network’s Larry Kane: Voice of Reason, a public affairs show televised on Sunday evenings.

“Were you ever offered a federal job to get out of this race?” Kane asked near the end of the 30-minute interview.

“Yes,” Sestak answered.

“Was it Navy secretary?” Kane asked.

“No comment,” Sestak replied.

In response to follow-up questions from the host, Sestak said the job was offered by the White House. He also nodded when asked if the offer was for a high-ranking post.

Here is the Fox coverage; it sounds like a windy “no comment, but if someone could find that Fox transcript and dump it in the comments that would be lovely.

Let’s note that nodding when asked if the job was offered by the White House is not the same as saying the offer came from a White House official; if Clinton met him as a White House emissary, Sestak’s response would have been reasonable.  We also note this:

The Washington Post reported yesterday [link] that Sestak, in a separate interview Thursday about White House pressure, said, “There has been some indirect means in which they were trying to offer things if I got out.”

And the initial Philadelphia Inquirer coverage was more clear about the haziness of the contact:

After yesterday’s taping, Sestak said he recalled the White House offer coming in July, as he was preparing to formally announce his Senate candidacy in August. He declined to identify who spoke to him or the job under discussion. Sestak also would not say whether the person who approached him worked for the administration or was an intermediary for the offer.

“I’m not going to say who or how and what was offered,” Sestak said in an interview. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate to go beyond what I said,” because the conversation was confidential.

Well, Sestak didn’t say it was not a White House official.  But it was clever of him to leave the door open for Clinton even last February.

As I read this, Sestak told the WaPo that the approach was indirect; he was vague with everyone else, but (at least initially) does not seem to have claimed that the approach came directly from a White House official.

All helpful for the Dems, and one can see why Sestak wants to leave his former C-in-C out of it.

Mona Charen at The Corner:

FWIW, I think these hunts for criminal wrongdoing are excessive and unhealthy. The Democrats do it incessantly to Republican office holders. That much having been said, this administration explanation seems quite lawyerly. And what can Sestak do, deny it? If he does, he thoroughly alienates himself from the Obama White House as well as many loyal Democrats. He answered a question honestly once and it’s caused no end of trouble.

Marc Ambinder:

It is hard to see, quite frankly, how this account implies any violation of criminal law, and how any law that governs the intersection of the executive branch and electoral politics would intend to criminalize routine and innocuous political horse-trading, especially since the President is dual-hatted, in our system, as the leader of his political party. Bribery is bribery, but the facts here, assuming you believe them, and I do tend to believe them, are exculpatory.

David Weigel:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca.), whose doggedness in asking question after question about an answer Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.) gave to a local TV reporter is bearing fruit, responds to the White House’s memo on what happened. Issa:

After more than ten weeks of outstanding questions, the White House has offered a version of events that has important differences from what Congressman Sestak has been saying for months – that he was offered a ‘job’ by ‘someone in the White House’ in exchange for leaving the Pennsylvania Senate race.I’m very concerned that in the rush to put together this report, the White House has done everything but explain its own actions and has instead worked to craft a story behind closed doors and coordinate with those involved. The White House has admitted today to coordinating an arrangement that would represent an illegal quid-pro-quo as federal law prohibits directly or indirectly offering any position or appointment, paid or unpaid, in exchange for favors connected with an election.

President Clinton and Congressman Sestak now need to answer questions about what the White House has released today – that at the behest of the White House Chief of staff, they dispatched a former President to get Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Senate Primary.

As Chris Cillizza argues, the White House more or less created this story by failing to give a straight answer about Sestak’s February claim of being offered some kind of job to leave the race against Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.). And I think Issa’s role as the chief critic had something to do with this.

Issa, who became ranking member of the Government Reform & Oversight Committee last year, has taken the wheel with both hands and issued statements, booked TV interviews, and pounded the table about plenty of issues that have not taken on life outside of the conservative media, such as the firing of an Americorps Inspector General in 2009 and the DOJ’s decision not to pursue a case against the New Black Panther Party. Liberals simply didn’t take his questions seriously, and assumed that the media would blow them off, too.

“You know,” Sestak said in an April 22 interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I didn’t make the allegation. I was asked the question and answered honestly. I don’t know Darrell Issa. He’s never come and talked to me. And he should do what he wants, but only the right-wing Republicans like him and Arlen Specter.”

But Sestak pitched a ball 5 mph down the plate, and it was inevitable that if Issa worked every day to ask these questions — and Sestak won his primary — the story would get somewhere. Democrats made a huge error in ignoring him and blowing him off.

Digby:

But more noteworthy for the Village is the fact that it was a) Clinton and b) it features an alleged “bribe” for a job.

Why is this noteworthy? Well, Bill Clinton was impeached for arranging for Vernon Jordan to offer Monica Lewinsky a job, remember? There is no doubt in my mind that the Villagers are salivating over this. So many “questions” remain. So many “concerns.” So many titillating possibilities.So much fun! (And keep in mind that these things are always trivial — that’s the point. It’s a show of strength to be able to turn a nonsensical scandal into a political threat, which is a skill the villagers greatly respect.)

During the impeachment I always used to say that it was actually proof that things were going pretty well in this country because otherwise nobody could justify wasting that kind of time and money on something so stupid. We can’t say that about this era. So I’m hopeful that the sheer volume of real news and the scope of the various crises confronting us will drown this idiocy out and that the public will reject such scandals for the trumped up nonsense they are. So far the polls for Sestak look as if that’s happening. But you can see the outline of the plot if they do care to pursue it. And the point of these things is to plant doubts and build upon them.

The bottom line is that no matter what, it isn’t illegal to offer someone a job, much less to turn one down and it is no crime for a politician to be miffed at the party establishment trying to muscle him out of the race and mentioning it on the trail. There is literally no there there besides the usual “process” story by which we are supposed to judge politicians on how well they play village games, the rules for which change on a daily basis and which always seem to turn petty, non-stories into major Democratic scandals while excusing far more egregious Republican offenses. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what mechanism makes that happen.

EARLIER: All Our Senate Candidates Bring Us Scandal

Milbloggers Release A Statement

Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive:

JOINT STATEMENT FROM MILITARY BLOGGERS                                                      12 MAY 2010

We consider the US military the greatest institution for good that has ever existed. No other organization has freed more people from oppression, done more humanitarian work or rescued more from natural disasters.  We want that to continue.

Today, it appears inevitable to us that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and law restricting those displaying open homosexual behavior from serving will be changed.  And yet, very little will actually change.  Homosexuals have always served in the US Military, and there have been no real problems caused by that.

The service chiefs are currently studying the impact and consequences of changing the DADT policy, and how to implement it without compromising the morale, order and discipline necessary for the military to function. The study is due to be completed on Dec. 1st. We ask Congress to withhold action until this is finished, but no longer.  We urge Congress to listen to the service chiefs and act in accordance with the recommendations of that study.

The US Military is professional and ready to adapt to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell without compromising its mission.  Echoing Sec. Def. Gates and ADM Mullen, we welcome open and honorable service, regardless of sexual orientation.

Matt Burden- Warrior Legacy Foundation & BLACKFIVE

Jim Hanson- Warrior Legacy Foundation & BLACKFIVE

Blake Powers- BLACKFIVE

Fred Schoenman- BLACKFIVE

David Bellavia- House to House

Bruce McQuain- Q&O

JD Johannes- Outside the Wire

Diane Frances McInnis Miller- Boston Maggie

Mark Seavey- This Ain’t Hell

Michael St. Jacques- The Sniper

Mary Ripley- US Naval Institute Blog

John Donovan- Castle Argghhh!

Andrew J. Lubin- The Military Observer

Marc Danziger- Winds of Change

Greta Perry- Hooah Wife

Bruce McQuain at Questions And Observations:

The expected pushback is already beginning to mount in the comment section of the link above.  I’ve thought about it long and hard.  I’ve actually changed my mind from years ago.  I guess that’s because I’ve known of and served with soldiers I knew were gay.  And every one of them were good soldiers who served honorably and did an excellent job.

I’ve also come to understand that it isn’t going to be the activists or those who want to flaunt their homosexuality who are going to seek to serve their country. Being a Soldier, Sailor, Marine or Airman is a hard, dirty and dangerous job.  Those that choose to serve are not going to do it because of who they love, but simply because want to serve their nation and the military is their chosen method of doing so.

This is a cultural change thing.  And the culture has been changing for years to more and more acceptance of homosexuality in terms of offering equal rights and protections.  This is simply an extension of that.  If I thought it would seriously effect readiness, I’d probably oppose it – but I don’t think it will.  Will there be some problems and some objections to overcome?  Yes.  But the military can and will overcome them.

The institution of the military is important to me, I’ve thought about this in some depth and come to the conclusion this is the right thing to do.  I agree with SecDef Gates and the JCS that DADT is a policy which needs to be repealed.  But I also support their recommendation that it needs to be done thoughtfully and at their own pace.  It also means that Congress will need to enact legislation to makes changes the UCMJ and some other necessary legislative steps to make this come to pass.

Sexual orientation should never be a bar to serving your country honorably in the profession of arms.

Ben Smith at Politico:

The community of “mil-bloggers” — often hawkish, critical of White House and military leadership, devoted to both the First and Second Amendments — isn’t easy to define politically, but has proven an increasingly powerful voice from the ranks. The statement, which says that there have always been gay soldiers and that “very little will actually change” with the repeal of “Don’t Ask,” carries the signatures of the authors of some of the most prominent: Blackfive, Q&O, Outside the Wire, and the US Naval Institute Blog, among others.

Rachel Slajda at Talking Points Memo:

Jim Hanson of BlackFive, who organized the effort, told TPM that not everyone who signed the statement wants repeal.

Instead, Hanson said, there was a sea change earlier this year when Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen announced their support for repeal. That’s when, for many who serve in or cover the military, repeal became inevitable.

“We wanted it done right,” he said. “We’re of the impression that if it’s gonna be done, that Congress doesn’t do it precipitously.”

Gates and Mullen have warned Congress against legislating such a change before December, the deadline for a Department of Defense review into how to best implement repeal.

The bloggers said they support waiting.

“We ask Congress to withhold action until this is finished, but no longer,” they wrote in the statement. “We urge Congress to listen to the service chiefs and act in accordance with the recommendations of that study.”

There are “a bunch of issues that need to be worked through if it’s gonna be the non-problem I think it’s gonna be,” Hanson said. “Let the service chiefs figure out how to do this, pass legislation that mirrors that and I think you’ll have a much less painful transition.”

Armed Services Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MO), however, said yesterday that he will put repeal into the Defense Authorization Act in committee markup this month if he can get the votes for it. That could lead to passage months earlier than Gates and Mullen want, but Levin said he’d make the effective date of repeal after December 1.

Hanson said he thinks including repeal in the authorization bill is a “horrible idea, because the military hasn’t had a chance to weigh in yet.”

“There’s no need for people to be chaining themselves to the White House fence,” he said, referring to Lt. Dan Choi, who recently did so to protest how slow repeal is moving. “Relax, and let’s do a good job of it.”

Vodka Pundit at Pajamas Media:

We’ve come a long way in just 15 years. By and large the troops support repeal, and I’ve never met a better or smarter group of people (even if we were in Vegas at the time, and I’m even including Uncle Jimbo ) than the folks at BlackFive and the other milbloggers. If they all say it’s time, then it’s time.

Allah Pundit:

I think it’s an impressively bold move, not only because they didn’t have to make it but because the bulk of their readership, I assume, comes from vets and hawks, both of which are perceived (fairly or not) as being cooler to repealing DADT than the average joe. But then, as Uncle Jimbo says of those who disagree, “no one’s going to lose their mind over DADT.”

Tom Maguire:

My *guess* was that the repeal of DADT would actually be easier in wartime when soldiers are focused on more important issues such as not getting blown up.

I Always Feel Like Somebody’s IDing Me

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

Ezra Klein:

The Democrats’ immigration-reform proposal (pdf) is 26 pages long. Pages 8 through 18 are devoted to “ending illegal employment through biometric employment verification.” I don’t think the Democrats are going to like me calling this a biometric national ID card, as they go to great lengths to say that it is not a national ID card, and make it “unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.”

But it’s still a biometric national ID card. It’s handed out by the Social Security Administration and employers are required to check it when hiring new employees. Essentially, if you want to participate in the American economy, you need this card. “Within five (5) years of the date of enactment, the fraud-proof social security card will serve as the sole acceptable document to be produced by an employee to an employer for employment verification purposes,” the bill says. “This requirement will exist even if the employer does not yet possess the capability to electronically verify the employee by scanning the card through a card reader.”

Jesse Walker at Reason:

Without defending Arizona’s latest lousy law in the immigration arena, I’ll give the place this much credit: At least the state fended off REAL ID.

Digby:

That ought to be good for six months worth of Beckian paranoia.

Is it possible that they thought it was smart to throw that in as a bargaining chip? If so it shows once again that Democrats should never, ever play poker.

Tom Maguire:

We need national ID cards or the terrorist win?  I deplore this fear-mongering, just as I know earnest libs deplored the fear-mongering of the Bush era.

But reflect with me – forcing passengers to remove their shoes prior to boarding a flight may deter some aspiring shoe bomber, and I think there is a strong societal consensus that having airplanes fall out of the sky unexpectedly is a bad thing.

But requiring a person to show an ID card before serving coffee at a local deli prevents what – bad coffee?  Forcing a lawn care service to ID their workers prevents what – crabgrass?  I’ll take my chances (“Danger” is my middle name…).

Somewhat more seriously (I am making an effort here), the complaint in Arizona that sparked their controversial new law is that they are being overrun with illegal drug smugglers, illegal human smugglers, and illegal workers.  If, I say IF Durbin’s new ID card was effective and IF small, off-the-book employers that are currently ignoring Social Security requirements and other work-related rules actually played along, we would still have done nothing to deter illegal drug smugglers.  Or does Durbin think the drug cartels will be applying for ID cards for their workers and enrolling them in the new health exchanges?

Terrorists are physically dangerous.  Drug smugglers are physically dangerous.  Most illegal workers are only dangerous to the wages of the Americans they might be displacing.  Let’s not muddle the dangers here.

John Cole:

Apparently they think the outcry over the Arizona “SHOW YOUR PAPERS” bill is that it will only be applied to Hispanics. Polls pretty clearly demonstrate that half the country has no problem with the Arizona bill because it will not affect them- it only is an inconvenience for “others” (meaning brown people). But start talking about a national id with biometric data that everyone has to be issued, and you will think the death panels and health care reform debate were a walk in the park.

And I’m not even talking about the actual merits and downsides to the id card. I’m talking about the freak-out that will be inevitable, some of which I will probably even agree with. This is just stunningly tone deaf.

A Weapons System Not Yet Out Of Short Pants

Robert Farley at Lawyers Guns and Money:

I’ll have an article about the NPR coming out tomorrow at TAP, but suffice to say that I’m not particularly impressed with the Obama NPR. Every policy document requires compromise, and this is particularly true of a document focusing on nuclear weapons. A multitude of different agencies and vested interests have fingers in the pie, and each demands to be part of the decision-making process. In this case, the administration has managed to achieve a caveated-to-death no first use pledge at the cost of two apparent compromises; missile defense, and prompt global strike. Josh Rogin takes a look at the missile defense bit here; I raised some questions about the presence of prompt-global strike language back in the QDR, and suffice it to say that the NPR does not assuage my concerns. Prompt global strike is mentioned a several points in the NPR as a replacement for first strike nuclear capabilities and a large nuclear stockpile. While prompt global strike doesn’t necessarily mean conventionally armed SLBMs and ICBMs, nothing in the language of the NPR excludes such options. Prompt global strike sounds, on the surface, like a good idea; an Ohio class submarine could deliver a conventional warhead in half and hour to almost any target in the world. The devil is in the details; intel is rarely good enough to require such speed, and the possibility of conventional SLBMs being regularly launched from submerged subs would freak the hell out of the Chinese and the Russians. In other words, not such a good idea. Perhaps the thinking is that rhetorical support of the program now won’t necessarily mean appropriation for it later. If that’s true, I’m not sure that the history of the missile defense program is terribly comforting.

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room at Wired:

Over and over again, the Bush administration tried to push the idea of these conventional ICBMs. Over and over again, Congress refused to provide the funds for it. The reason was pretty simple: those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. “The launch of such a missile,” then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in a state of the nation address after the announcement of the Bush-era plan, “could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

The Pentagon mumbled all kinds of assurances that Beijing or Moscow would never, ever, never misinterpret one kind of ICBM for the other. But the core of their argument essentially came down to this: Trust us, Vlad Putin! That ballistic missile we just launched in your direction isn’t nuclear. We swear!

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t even muster that coherent of a defense.

“Everyone in the world would know that [the missile] was conventional,” he said in a press conference, “after it hit within 30 minutes.”

The new “Prompt Global Strike” plan is a little different from the old one. It relies on land-based missiles, instead of sub-based ones. The idea is that these conventional missiles sites would be open to Russian inspection, and wouldn’t accidentally drop debris on a superpower.

But Moscow doesn’t exactly seem soothed by this new plan. “World states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this month.

When the idea of Prompt Global Strike was first proposed, the goal was to hit anywhere on the planet in under an hour. Old-school weapons had proved ineffective at catch terrorists on the move. Newer, quicker arms might be able to do the job, instead. Flight tests for some of those weapons — like a hypersonic cruise missile — are just getting underway. Until then, relying on conventional ICBMs to do the job, and risking a nuclear showdown, is just plain crazy.

More Farley:

Yeah, I’m really not sure that changing to an atmospheric quasi-ballistic missile from SLBMs really helps. For one, the shift would somewhat reduce the promptness of the global strike (although probably not by much). More importantly, it doesn’t really solve the dilemma. If Putin/Medvedev/Hu/Whomever are inclined to worry that a detected launch was the prelude to an all-out nuclear attack, they’ll likely not be reassured by the news that it comes from some “special” location in the US. If the US decided to launch a preventive nuclear assault on Russia or China, wouldn’t we initiate the attack in the most deceptive way possible?

This isn’t to say that we should eschew research of any weapon that can decrease the time between order and KABOOM.
Questions of strategic stability, however, need to be taken very seriously. How willing would we be to use these weapons in a war over the Taiwan Straits? In response to another Russia-Georgia War? Or, perhaps even more disconcerting, what if we decided we needed to kill Osama Bin Laden with 30 minutes notice during the midst of a Russia-Georgia War that we were otherwise uninterested in?

Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent:

It’s an immature weapons system, barely in development, that looks for the moment like it was imagined by Wile E. Coyote. And the Nuclear Posture Review basically held it out as the conventional alternative to nuclear weapons.

Partly because elements of the technology behind Prompt Global Strike are “not yet even invented,” it’s hard to say what the system will ultimately cost or when it can be deployed. The New START accord with the Russians even had to limit its development because once launched from an intercontinental ballistic missile, it would be hard for Russia or any other power to determine with confidence that such a missile didn’t carry a nuclear payload.

Relatedly, here’s something that should warm Sen. Jon Kyl’s (R-Ariz.) New START-opponent heart but surely won’t: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a NATO forum that the U.S. won’t withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe until there’s a follow-on treaty with Russia ensuring the Russians will do the same.

Kevin Drum:

Even if the Russians and Chinese and Indians and Pakistanis are provided with some reliable way of identifying non-nuclear ICBM launches, they could never be sure that the United States hadn’t figured out some way to fool them. So they’d always be on a short fuse. And do we really want to make that particular fuse even shorter than it already is?

Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. This really seems like one of them.

Matthew Yglesias:

The deeper issue, I would say, is that the pursuit of whiz-bang air power capabilities is often done with no thought as to the strategic implications. Every time we develop new offensive weapons designed to let us attack anywhere around the world with impunity, the more we’re incentivizing other countries to develop WMD capabilities to counter us. The mentality inside the Air Force is a sort of autopilot pursuit of better and better equipment that’s detached from any realistic vision of what we’re trying to achieve as a nation.

Tom Maguire:

The basic problem is that land-based missiles are vulnerable to a first strike attack by incoming missiles.  Consequently, anyone with land-based missiles, such as Russia or China, faces a “Use it or lose it” dilemma when their screen lights up with missiles launched from the US – do they wait to see what lands and goes “Boom”, or do they launch their own missiles while they still can?  This is not a new issue – people have been talking about first-strike weapons from the dawn of the nuclear age (It’s why we have hotlines).

Mitigating Russian concerns to some extent would be the number of missiles they actually see launched.   One or two missiles would not take out their entire land-based capability, so if (IF!) they could be confident of maintaining their command and control structure, they might be persuaded to sit back and await developments.

However!  All of that is covered by the Times.  What the Times utterly ignores, or overlooks, is the problem a weapon such as this would cause for Iran, North Korea or any other small crazy country with a much smaller nuclear arsenal.  The US weapon could be deployed around 2020.  Will North Korea or Iran have a missile or two capable of reaching the US by then?  If so, they will be stuck with the “Use it or lose it” problem, and may feel obliged to launch on warning.

Now, maybe the plan is that North Korea won’t develop the surveillance capability by 2020 to know whether we have launched our own missiles.  That’s reassuring!  Or maybe we can count on crazy countries not to do something crazy.  But this is a weapon that should not be built until these problems have been hashed through.

Legal Insurrection:

According to the article in The Times, the Russians and Chinese have a concern that these weapons could have a destabilizing effect because it would not be known if they carried a nuclear or conventional weapon, so if it is deployed, steps would need to be taken to make clear that they were non-nuclear.

That is all well and good. Verification with the Russians and Chinese to prevent a destabilizing effect is one thing. Counting conventional weapons the same as nuclear weapons, however, is nonsensical.

Thomas Exchanged E-Mails With Siobhan

Spencer S. Hsu, Carol D. Leonnig and Ellen Nakashima at WaPo:

A former senior executive with the National Security Agency has been indicted on 10 felony charges related to the alleged leaking of classified information to a national newspaper in 2006 and 2007, the Justice Department announced Thursday morning.

Thomas A. Drake, 52, headed an office in the NSA’s signals intelligence and engineering directorates at Fort Meade between 2001 and 2005, U.S. officials said. The indictment alleges that Drake exchanged hundreds of e-mails with a reporter for a national newspaper and served as a source for its articles about Bush administration intelligence policies and agency management failures between February 2006 and November 2007, U.S. officials said.

According to the indictment, Drake had access to highly classified documents and information, and he provided some of that information to the reporter.

The indictment does not name the reporter, but The Washington Post has learned that she was Siobhan Gorman, a prize-winning intelligence correspondent for the Baltimore Sun at the time and subsequently at the Wall Street Journal. Gorman published a string of articles that spotlighted poor management of NSA facilities and its failure to set priorities.

Justin Elliott at TPM:

The indictment alleges that NSA senior executive Thomas Drake was connected to the reporter via a mutual friend who was a congressional staffer. Through accounts on the private email communication service Hushmail, Drake and the reporter allegedly exchanged hundreds of emails. He allegedly scanned and emailed “electronic copies of classified and unclassified documents to the reporter.”

The indictment alleges that the reporter agreed to refer to Drake as a “senior intelligence official” and that the articles were published between roughly Feb. 27, 2006, and Nov. 28, 2007.

Gorman covered the NSA, which focuses on communications intelligence and is based in Fort Meade, Maryland, during that period. On Feb. 26, 2006, she penned a piece headlined “Computer ills hinder NSA.” It began:

“WASHINGTON — Two technology programs at the heart of the National Security Agency’s drive to combat 21st-century threats are stumbling badly, hampering the agency’s ability to fight terrorism and other emerging threats, current and former government officials say.”

And continued: “A former NSA employee put it more bluntly, as he explained why he was speaking to a reporter for the first time, though on the condition of anonymity: ‘What I am fearful of is: Because of all this, we will have a 9/11 Part II.’

Julian Sanchez:

So a new source at NSA speaking to a reporter for an article published at the end of February 2006 is a match. The other bookend is November 2007, when Gorman wrote “Targeting Internet terror,” building on an earlier Sun exclusive about a classified NSA cyber-security initiative. Shortly thereafter, Gorman moved to the Wall Street Journal—where she continues to do absolutely groundbreaking national security reporting. I note that in both cases, the stories involve classified information about NSA activities, but not sensitive and compartmentalized interception programs, which Drake would have been unlikely to have access to. The stories that match the indictment timeline, in other words, are also stories on which Drake makes sense as a source. No doubt we’ll find out for certain soon enough.

Update: I see that Scott Shane at the New York Times came to the same conclusion I did; his article pretty much takes for granted that the articles referenced are from Gorman’s stint at the Sun.

Update II: And apparently Fox and The Washington Post have both confirmed it’s Gorman.

Stewart Baker:

How did that happen?  For starters, cyberspace is not completely anonymous.  Even if Hushmail’s encryption system were foolproof, webmail systems usually record the IP addresses of their users, which would allow investigators to confirm that the NSA official was using the service — and perhaps to associate the timing of the emails to the reporter’s stories, or even her own Hushmail use.  (I’m assuming the leaker used his home or, if he’s an idiot, his work computer; but even if he went to a cybercafe or wifi-enabled hotel lobby, it would still be possible to trace him with a bit of work.)

Armed with that information, it wouldn’t be hard to obtain an order forcing disclosure of the content of the official’s emails, since leaking classified information is a crime.  Legally, that order would go through Canadian officials and courts, but in the end it would be served on Hushmail and honored.  As Hushmail has acknowledged, it has the ability to decrypt mail sent to its server when it receives a valid court order.

I think we’ll see more cases like this.  In my experience, most leakers, even of highly classified material, are motivated by surprisingly petty interests – things like spite, flattery, and a desire to win intramural debates by other means.  It’s not that the rewards of leaking are so great; it’s that the downside risk seems so small.  For the same reason, leakers often don’t use world-class tradecraft to protect themselves; they are protected largely by the perception, inside government and out, that leakers cannot be caught.

But that’s no longer true.  We leave a much longer transactional trail in cyberspace than Deep Throat ever did.   And mainstream media is losing the financial and publicity clout it once used to protect leakers and reporters from investigation.   Brought by the Obama administration to punish leaks that hurt NSA in the last administration, this case could mark the end of an era — one that only really began in 1971, with the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

Ed Morrissey:

Kudos to the DoJ for pursuing the leaker.  Having the Obama administration press this case makes it even stronger, I believe.  It eliminates any hint of retribution and puts it firmly in the frame of violating our national security.  If Drake is guilty, he had other options than leaking to the Times if he disagreed with the operations at the NSA.   He could have gone to the White House, or failing that, to the leadership of the intelligence committees in Congress, which certainly would have provided him with an audience.  Instead, the leaker (whoever he is) kneecapped our ability to track terrorists and politicized national security unnecessarily.

Tom Maguire:

WHERE ARE THOSE LONG-FORGOTTEN TALKING POINTS WHEN WE NEED THEM?  There was a time when something like this, especially from The Captain, would set me off or turn me gray:

Oddly, though, the same people who expressed outrage over the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA analyst never got terribly exercised over these breaches of national security (and to be fair, the same holds true in reverse).

Ahhh!  There has never been evidence that Richard Armitage, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer or anyone else thought that they were revealing a Big Secret when they mentioned that Joe Wilson had been picked by his wife to check out a story from Niger.  Nor is there evidence that Bob Novak thought it was particularly consequential when he published it.  Nor is there evidence that it was in fact consequential, other than as a political club for beating Republicans.

But it is quite clear (at least, from my seat here on the right) that some of the Times outings were unhelpful.

John Hinderaker at Powerline:

Unfortunately, Drake’s leaks don’t appear to be the ones that threatened national security. Rather, they put NSA’s bureaucracy in an unflattering light:

Gorman’s coverage of NSA often placed an unflattering focus on NSA administrators. An August 2006 story quoted intelligence officials as showing that the NSA eavesdropping facilities in Fort Meade were at risk of paralysis because of electrical overload and potential failure of the power supply.

We’re not the only ones who wonder why this should be the Justice Department’s priority:

By comparison, some federal officials have questioned privately why the New York Times’ revelation about domestic wiretapping that bypassed a special surveillance court has not led to any leak prosecutions.

In what must be one more disappointment for Obama supporters, the administration has promised to be “more aggressive” than the Bush administration about going after leakers. Even if, as it appears here, they are the wrong ones.

UPDATE: Via Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald

Radley Balko